Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I descended the poop.”

— Joseph Conrad

452. “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

— Joseph Conrad

453. “This was the foreman – a boiler-maker by trade – a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.”

— Joseph Conrad

454. “They give you wages as they’d fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It’s worse than slavery. You don’t expect a slave that’s bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work – what is it but selling your own self? You’ve got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ah! But they throw at you your week’s money and expect you to say, “thank you” before you pick it up.”

— Joseph Conrad

455. “It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”

— Joseph Conrad

456. “The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.”

— Joseph Conrad

457. “No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...”

— Joseph Conrad

458. “It was unreal as everything else – as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their government, as their show of work.”

— Joseph Conrad

459. “Long after he had vanished, Nostromo, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, “I am not dead yet.”

— Joseph Conrad

460. “Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf – then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.”

— Joseph Conrad

461. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

— Joseph Conrad

462. “He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

463. “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

— Joseph Conrad

464. “But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”

— Joseph Conrad

465. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage.”

— Joseph Conrad

466. “Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs.”

— Joseph Conrad

467. “Lord, lay me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!”

— Joseph Conrad

468. “He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.”

— Joseph Conrad

469. “A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”

— Joseph Conrad

470. “Between the five of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yatching, cruising, and so on can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.”

— Joseph Conrad

471. “I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a posi-tive relief, being something that had a right to exist – obviously – in the sunshine.”

— Joseph Conrad

472. “The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I.”

— Joseph Conrad

473. “Give them all of my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.”

— Joseph Conrad

474. “It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil.”

— Joseph Conrad

475. “I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.”

— Joseph Conrad

476. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

477. “We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face:.”

— Joseph Conrad

478. “The human heart is a vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?”

— Joseph Conrad

479. “He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

480. “This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh.”

— Joseph Conrad

481. “Then the earth for you is only a standing place – and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say.”

— Joseph Conrad

482. “Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its fate.”

— Joseph Conrad

483. “My dear aunt’s endeavours to ‘nurse up my strength’ seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

484. “There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It’s like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.”

— Joseph Conrad

485. “Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well, – the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

— Joseph Conrad

486. “But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.”

— Joseph Conrad

487. “Those who tow’rds Acheron do not descend.”

— Joseph Conrad

488. “There can be no life without faith and love – faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That.”

— Joseph Conrad

489. “A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.”

— Joseph Conrad

490. “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,” he said.”

— Joseph Conrad

491. “There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.”

— Joseph Conrad

492. “Stein lifted his hand. “And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?” He shook his head regretfully. “It seems to me that some would have been very fine – if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.”

— Joseph Conrad

493. “It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

— Joseph Conrad

494. “This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.”

— Joseph Conrad

495. “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

— Joseph Conrad

496. “The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar.”

— Joseph Conrad

497. “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship;.”

— Joseph Conrad

498. “Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-mad might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough there to bury five millions of lives.”

— Joseph Conrad

499. “Our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright – an extra-terrestrial touch.”

— Joseph Conrad

500. “He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread1 – but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.”

— Joseph Conrad